What We Do / Our Initiatives
Enabling Workforces & Organisations for Thriving Kids
Purpose
Enabling workforces and organisations to work in ways that increase opportunities for every child in every community to thrive by sharing and deepening contemporary knowledge, skills and language about:
- incidence and impacts of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), trauma, complexity and diversity, and
- brain and body health and development, mental wellbeing, healing and resilience for children, young people and their families.
Partners
Enabling Workforces and Organisations for Thriving Kids is an initiative of Thriving Queensland Kids Partnership in collaboration with Emerging Minds, Yiliyapinya Indigenous Corporation, The Queensland Brain Institute at The University of Queensland and Dovetail, supported by the Queensland Mental Health Commission (QMHC).
Supporting our strong base of skilled workers
Across Queensland we have 100,000s of skilled people working with children and young people every day.
Many of these frontline workers are already experts in child development and know the latest science about connecting brains to bodies.
However, it’s not fair – for workers or children – that access to this information isn’t equally available to everyone.
When we equip and support the people who work directly with children – for example, teachers, doctors, nurses, youth workers, early childhood educators – with the latest evidence, we see huge benefits for children.
We also see benefits for adults and their workplaces. Because when we’re all well supported with evidence-based tools, we can do our jobs better and with less stress.
Our starting point
Enabling Workforces and Organisations for Thriving Kids is bringing the right people together to make this happen:
- We have content experts (i.e. neuroscientists as well as those with frontline experience)
- We have education experts (i.e. who know how to translate knowledge & create effective learning materials)
- We have employers wanting to better support their workers (including the Queensland Government, who employ teachers, youth workers, child safety officers, police and health workers)
- We have skilled and motivated workers who want to get the best outcomes for children.
…And we are listening to, and learning from, all of these groups to work out the best way to get the most important information into our systems and onto the frontline as soon as possible. This will bring immediate as well as long term benefits for Queensland.
In the first stage of the project, the primary focus is on Government sector workforces and agencies.
The Project Group is working closely with the QMHC to engage people from Health, Education, Youth Justice, Police, Child Protection, the Queensland Family and Child Commission (QFCC) and other agencies and authorities.
We knew that lots of great learning resources already exist, and are being used across Queensland.
So our first step has been to ask government organisations what resources they are currently using to educate workers about child brain development.
We now have a valuable (growing) Toolkit that we can all use to bolster our knowledge and support our workers with trusted advice. To make this Toolkit as useful as possible, we’ve sorted the resources according to:
- Topics (Brain Development & Brain Health, Protective and Adverse Childhood Experiences, Trauma & Healing, Resilience, The Whole Person)
- Length of video/module or training
- Intended impact:
- Heart: includes short, emotive, core message dissemination, common language/knowledge
- Head: includes understanding the ‘why’, actionable insights, opportunity for reflection into practice
- Hand: includes deeper understanding of the ‘how’, and ongoing supports
Next steps
The Enabling Workforces Toolkit is designed to be a living resource that grows as new evidence becomes available and as new resources are created. So from here we are:
- Continuing to talk to workers about gaps and opportunities
- Continuing to talk to organisations about other resources that can be added to our list
- Working with Emerging Minds to transform the existing resource into an e-learning hub in 2025. This will be a free, fully searchable, accessible resource that will be available for anyone who works with children or has an interest in child brain development.
Part of a broader workforce package:
This will also become part of a co-designed responsive workforce package bespoke to Queensland Government Policy, which will be aligned to professional standards and competencies across government agencies and will draw on lived experience, evidence-informed practice and existing ecosystem resources.
How you can get involved
Enabling Workforces and Organisations for Thriving Kids is for everyone who interacts with children.
- Explore the online version of the Enabling Workforces Toolkit.
For more information or to talk about how to get more involved, contact michelle.cole@aracy.org.au.
Supporting documents
DOWNLOAD
The Brain in Context: A Scoping Review and Concept Definition of Neuro-Informed Policy and Practice
This scoping review examined the use and conceptualisation of neuro-informed policy and practice (NPP) over the last two decades. It highlights the importance of defining the concept of neuro-informed policy and practice, extending beyond the brain or individual in isolation to include consideration of the brain in context.
Authors include the Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland; School of Nursing, Queensland University of Technology; and Thriving Queensland Kids Partnership.
DOWNLOAD
Brain Builder Workforces Booklet: The Neuro-informed Policy and Practice Framework & Evidence Brief
This work from the Queensland Brain Institute and Thriving Queensland Kids Partnership emerged from a need to establish a clear conceptualisation and identify key knowledge bases that underpin a neuro-informed approach.
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